She was accused of inciting racial hatred for comparing
Muslim street prayers to the occupation of France by Nazi
Germany. A Lyon court requested for her immunity to be
removed three years ago. A majority of parliamentarians voted to
ratify the decision.

A public trial in France would
be a setback for the National Front (FN), a far-right party
headed by Le Pen. The movement's popularity has been rising since
the last election and it was hoping to grab seats from the ruling
Socialist Party and mainstream right in local and European
Parliament elections next year.

The request came from the
prosecutor’s office in Lyon, where in December 2010 Ms Pen told
FN supporters in a speech that the sight of Muslim’s praying was
similar to Nazi soldiers occupying France between 1940 and
1944.

Her speech, which was
broadcast by the French media, said that France was seeing
“more and more veils and burkas, after that came praying on
the streets, I’m sorry but some people are very fond of talking
about the Second World War and about the occupation, so let’s
talk about the occupation, because that is what is happening
here, there are no tanks or soldiers, but it is still an
occupation and it weighs on people.”

Speaking to the broadcaster
LCI on Tuesday she said would lose her parliamentary immunity
"because I'm a dissident", adding: "I'm not at all
afraid of it, I'm scornful of it".

Marine Le Pen is known for her
strong stance on immigration issues. She believes that
stricter measures need to be taken to ensure France’s success as
a nation as it strikes a balance between manual and intellectual
work.

She says some deterrents need
to be introduced so that immigrants will be deincentived from
coming to France.

“Today there are even illegal immigrants who benefit from
larger social aid that some French citizens can’t obtain,”
she said
on RT's SophieCo .

In 2011 France became the
first country in the EU to ban the wearing of the niqab, a face
covering Islamic veil for women, and praying in the street was
banned in Paris as a result of growing far-right protests.

Ms Le Pen took 17.9 percent of
the vote in the first round of the French presidential election
last year.

As rising joblessness in
France fuels the spread of her euro-skeptic anti-immigrant views,
the EU part is gaining support at the expense of Hollande’s
socialists.

One poll by YouGov in June
showed that the FN may get as much as 18 percent of the vote in
the May 2014 European elections. By comparison, when Le Len won
her EU parliament seat in 2009 in the North-West region of
France, her party managed just 6.3 percent of the vote.

Another web poll in May
conducted by L’Internaute put her as France’s third most popular
politician, one position behind the former president Nicholas
Sarkozy and 24 places ahead of current president Hollande.

If found guilty she could face
a maximum penalty of a year in prison and a fine of 45,000
euros.

Her father Jean Marie Le Pen
founded the French National Front and was stripped of his legal
immunity as a French MEP for Holocaust denial in 1998 and was
convicted under a similar charge.